


Breathing Down Your Neck

by Owlship



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Angst, F/M, Gen, Mercy Killing, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Vignette, it was all a dream, suicide by zombie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-23 01:17:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23203414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Owlship/pseuds/Owlship
Summary: He ducks his head and shows her the bite wound. It's a throbbing ugly thing in the meat of his arm, turning sickly green-gray at the edges where it isn't bloody red. It looks like the death sentence it is.
Relationships: Furiosa/Max Rockatansky
Comments: 4
Kudos: 42





	1. Max & Furiosa

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not the only one wiling away the Coronavirus quarantine period by reading a bunch of zombie fics, right? Well anyway, have some zombies, albeit ones from last year.
> 
> Originally posted [on tumblr](https://v8roadworrier.tumblr.com/tagged/zombie-au)!

The infection spreads slowly, but not slowly enough. Max has enough time to lock himself into one of the research pens- chain link fencing and cinderblocks, the remains of what has once been a vet clinic's boarding area. He has enough time to wrap one of the modified dog muzzles around his head, giving a greater chance that he can be a safe research subject for them once he's gone.

He has enough time for Furiosa to find him, anger blazing in her eyes.

"What the fuck, Max?" she demands of him, standing just outside the fencing barrier.

Max regards her silently. He assumes she already knows there's only one reason he'd lock himself away like this. When she doesn't say anything, either, just stands there with her feet planted firmly in the worn concrete, hand on her hip, he ducks his head and shows her the bite wound. It's a throbbing ugly thing in the meat of his arm, turning sickly green-gray at the edges where it isn't bloody red. It looks like the death sentence it is.

Furiosa sucks in a quick little breath, like she really was hoping there was some other explanation. "You weren't wearing your armor," she accuses.

He shrugs, because it really doesn't matter now.

"God, Max," she says, and steps closer to the fencing, close enough that he could reach out and grab her hand. The vision turns violent in a second and he pictures himself grabbing that hand and _biting_ , tasting her blood and flesh on his tongue, and he flinches back.

"I'm sorry," he rasps out, pressed up against the cool cinderblocks at the other end of the pen. "Furiosa, I'm sorry, sorry. And I... I lo-"

"Don't you _dare_ ," she snaps, cutting him off. Her head swings back and forth in slow disbelief, her arms rise to curl around her middle protectively. "You don't get to do this to me."

"I love you," he says anyway. The noise she makes is animal and wounded, and he finds himself up against the barrier between them, their foreheads leaning in to each other with the metal wires pressing into their skin. Already the sensation is dulled, his brain slowing down as he dies. "Should have told you earlier," he says, "Every day. I love you."

"I hate you," she says, her voice thick and wet, "Damn you, Max."

He hums, knowing what she isn't saying. Close like this he can smell her, the familiar scent of her skin and clothes, so warm and vibrant and alive. He hopes she gets to stay that way for a long, long time.

"Take care of the girls?" he says, the words slowing down on his tongue, the sounds becoming clumsy.

"Of course," she replies immediately. Her fingers reach through the grate and press against his cheek and he turns into the touch, glad suddenly for the mesh of the muzzle that keeps his mouth away from her. He would have liked to kiss her, just once, and now he'll never get the chance.

"Do you want a bullet?" she says, voice low, intimate.

He shakes his head, but the words to explain that he's giving himself up for them don't come. She has to know, anyway- if he wanted to go out the quick way, the easy way, he would have swallowed a bullet as soon as he realized he was infected. This way he can be of some use, even if it means a slow horrifying slide into the loss of his own sense of self.

Max shudders and reluctantly pulls himself away from her, moving to sit down on the ground with his back against the wall.

"Sta....ay?" he manages to croak out.

"Of course," Furiosa says, and mirrors his pose just on the other side of safety.

The last thing he consciously can think of is how selfishly glad he is that she's there, that he hasn't died alone. And then there's nothing but darkness, and hunger, and rage.


	2. Toast & Cheedo

Things start to break down after Max gets infected. Furiosa goes off the deep end, barely stopping to eat or sleep, killing zombies with neat headshots like it's the only thing keeping her alive. Capable tries to reach out to her, the memory of Nux fresh in her mind, but Furiosa doesn't talk much, these days.

Toast puts her head down and works in her lab, trying desperately to forget that the _thing_ moaning and howling in the pen used to be Max. (She never realized how hard it would be to look at a creature with the same face as one of her friends)

"Toast," Cheedo says, breaking her concentration as she's pipetting an experimental solution onto a slide of Max's- the _subject's_ \- blood cells.

"Yeah?" Toast replies, figuring she's missed another meal and Cheedo is here to scold her.

But Cheedo isn't holding a tray of food, isn't faintly smiling the way she does when she has to play caretaker to their resident mad scientist. Her eyes are huge and round, shiny-wet in the bright lab lighting.

"Cheedo?" Toast says, alarmed. "Is it Furiosa?" They're all waiting for it, for her to get too sloppy or too engrossed in her vengeance and get infected.

Cheedo shakes her head and almost shyly extends her hand. There's a small spot of blood on it, and Toast's first thought is relief. Cheedo's just cut herself and needs a bandage, is all.

Then the implications slam down on her, and Toast gasps.

"Max's muzzle came loose," Cheedo explains. She's the only one who hasn't stopped calling the _thing_ by the name of their friend. "He was docile so I thought I could get it tightened up, but somehow..."

"He bit you," Toast says. Her mind is whirling so fast she can't concentrate. Cheedo's infected now, there isn't any other outcome- immunity is a myth.

Cheedo nods miserably. She looks over her shoulder to where the thing that used to be Max is pacing his pen, walking aimless circles. The muzzle's slipped almost all the way off his face, now.

"What do you want to do?" Toast says far more calmly than she actually feels. "You might be immune..."

Cheedo can't be infected, not sweet caring Cheedo who always laughs at Dag's bizarre humor, who cooks the best meals with the worst ingredients, who smiled like her face was going to split apart when Max found a painting kit to give to her and then spent weeks decorating every surface she could get her hands on. Not Cheedo.

"No," Cheedo says with a firm shake of her head. "I'm not. We both know it. I don't want to become like Max is. Please, don't make me turn into one of them."

"Okay," Toast says, soothingly. "Do you want to wait for the others to come back?" Furiosa and Capable and Dag had gone off scavenging, looking for plants to add to their small garden.

Cheedo shakes her head again. "We can't make Furiosa do that," she says, and then her eyes finally spill over with tears, "I don't want Dag to see me like that."

"Okay, okay," Toast says, holding up her hands placatingly. Somehow, she always knew she'd one day have to be the one to pull the trigger. "Not in here, though."

Cheedo nods, tears still streaming down her face. Out of all of them, she's always been the prettiest crier, the kind that makes you want to cry in sympathy and do whatever you can to get her to stop.

Toast doesn't need to check that she has her gun with her- it's a familiar weight on her hip, something she's all but slept with since this outbreak started. She leads Cheedo out back to their garden walled-in, to the little bench under the tree they like to sit out on on sunny days. It's overcast today, fittingly.

"Tell me about the garden," Toast says. "Dag's planted some flowers, hasn't she?"

Cheedo sniffles and nods. "Hyacinth, and magnolias. They don't do anything they're just-" she sniffs loudly, "They're just pretty." She turns to Toast, eyes dark and liquid, "Toast, don't do this. Just make it fast."

Toast nods and draws her gun. She places it against the side of Cheedo's skull and Cheedo strains her eyes to look at it, before shutting her eyes. She nods.

Toast makes sure her own eyes are closed- she should have grabbed a splash mask, stupid of her- and pulls the trigger.

She always knew she'd be the one asked to kill one of her friends, her family, but she never realized just how much it would feel like killing herself to do it.


	3. Furiosa

The vet clinic is too quiet. It has been ever since Furiosa came back to find Toast holding back tears over Cheedo's bloody corpse, and Dag screamed herself into silence. Dag was always the least stable of them, but with Cheedo and her garden it was enough, they'd thought.

The garden is burned to ash now, the markers over their makeshift graveyard scorched. Only Furiosa is left here at the end of the world, moving like she's pulled by strings, jerky and listless. She ate the last of the food last night, ran out of bullets a week before that. She could try and leave the compound to scavenge more, but then she'd have to pass by the place she shot Capable, her body left in the open air because the swarm was too large to fight through for something as trivial as burial rites.

Furiosa finds herself back in the lab, such as it is. Toast with her amature's knowledge kept working as long as she could, kept trying everything- but there was nothing to find. The disease kills its hosts completely, no hope of recovery, no hope of a vaccine.

"Hey, Max," she says tiredly as she folds her legs down to sit on the cold cement floor outside his pen.

The creature that used to be the love of her life jerks its head, sniffs the air like an animal. His skin is rotting away, bloated and blackened in places, sloughing down to reveal muscles and tissue underneath in others. There's still that damn cowlick at the back of his head, sticking up to give him a perpetually confused air.

He moans low in his throat, a death's rattle from a body that doesn't realize it's dead yet.

She should have saved a bullet for him, she thinks, should have finally let him go. But she was too weak. She hadn't wanted to kill him, even if he was already dead.

"It's just us," she says. She's tired, from more than the lack of food. A section of fencing collapsed the other day and she can hear footsteps outside, milling about aimlessly, the creatures aware there's someone living inside but too stupid to know how to do anything about it. "I let them down," she says, "I let them all down."

Max snuffles the air and presses himself against the door of the cage, the metal rattling against his weight.

"I'm sorry," she says. What's the point of trying anymore, she thinks? Everyone she's ever cared for is dead, some by her own hand. She watched the only man she's ever loved turn into a mindless creature right before her eyes and wasn't able to do anything to even ease his passage.

Furiosa hangs her head, and then snaps upright as she hears the sound of the clinic's front door being slammed into. There must be enough zombies to have a proper horde-mind, and that means her options are: stand her ground, and die; run, and perhaps live another meaningless string of days before dying; or take matters into her own hands.

She can't leave Max alone, not after all they've gone through. The last thing he ever asked of her was for her to stay.

"Hey, Max," she says, getting to her feet. The sound of bodies impacting the door rings out again, but it's holding for now. "I loved you too, Max, you know that, right?"

The zombie wearing Max's face lets out a low moan and gnashes its teeth.

She smiles ruefully and unlatches the gate, shoving her way inside before she accidentally lets the thing that used to be Max out.

He's on her in a second, no restraint, no recognition. Furiosa had told herself she wouldn't fight it but it's hard to override bone-deep instincts and so she thrashes, hits at him. It's useless. His teeth dig into her flesh, tearing great chunks from her as she shouts in pain.

Her head hits the floor with a sharp _crack_ and she knows nothing else.


	4. Waking Up

Furiosa wakes with a gasp, the noise and the feeling of her hand suddenly scrabbling at him causing Max to jerk awake as well.

"Mhm?" he hums, blinking in the pre-dawn gloom.

"You're okay," she says, fingers running over the side of his face carefully, reverently.

Ah, he thinks. A dream. Max takes her hand in his and presses a kiss to the palm of it. "I'm okay," he replies, voice crackling with sleep.

Furiosa sighs and pulls him against her, until he's partially lying on top of her, her head buried into the crook of her neck. Whatever it was it was bad, and he's surprised but grateful that she wants this contact.

"Wanna talk about it?" he says after a moment, when her breathing's started to soften back into its normal rhythm.

"No," she says, and he hums in understanding. But then she does begin speaking. "There was a disease," she says, words muffled where her mouth is hidden against his skin, "You- you got infected, and turned into this sort of creature. Dead, but not dead."

"Mmm," Max replies, and starts rubbing over her upper arm with his free hand, finger still twined tightly together.

"And the girls, the girls all died one by one. I had to kill them before they became monsters, too."

He presses a kiss to the top of her head. "It didn't happen," he says. "We're okay. We're safe."

"I _know_ that," she snipes, fingers going tight around his before relaxing again. "I couldn't kill you, though. The monsters were coming in through the doors and I let you kill me, instead."

Max doesn't know how to feel about that. He can't imagine him ever, ever hurting Furiosa for real- not since those first few desperate minutes, and even then, he shot the ground around her instead. "It's over," is what he says, and Furiosa sighs heavily.

"Yeah," she says, hair rasping against his beard as she nods her head. They're quiet for a few minutes, Max just starting to think he might be able to fall back asleep- not always a given, when he's woken up like this- when she sighs again and says, "Distract me."

"Oh?" he replies, shifting and wiggling so they're nose to nose on the mattress. "Any ideas how?"

She smiles a little at him and kisses him on the cheek, then the lips.

They don't manage to fall back asleep until long after the sun's started to rise.


End file.
